14 DAY TRIAL // I’m not sure how popular BlackBerry is in India, but the Canadian handset maker has just announced that it has dropped pricing on the Q10 smartphone temporarily.
According to fonearena, the QWERTY handset was launched in India several months ago for no less than Rs 44,990 ($725 / €530) outright, but starting today, fans will be able to grab the BlackBerry Q10 for Rs 38,990 ($625/€460).
“There are several customers in India who love the physical QWERTY experience offered by BlackBerry. At this compelling price point, QWERTY loyalists can take advantage of the powerful BlackBerry 10 platform as well as the unique QWERTY experience that the BlackBerry Q10 offers,” said Sunil Lalvani, managing director India for BlackBerry.
The discount might look pretty consistent, but the Indian smartphone market is focused on affordable smartphones with certain features like dual-SIM.
However, the fact that Apple’s latest iPhone devices proved to be surprisingly popular in India over the past couple of weeks may prove beneficial for BlackBerry as well.
BlackBerry’s 10 OS-based smartphones are very expensive in India, which ultimately leads to low sale. The recent discount on BlackBerry Q10 during the festive period is probably one of the first steps towards a new pricing policy for BlackBerry 10 devices in India.
BlackBerry Q10 should have been the first smartphone to be released with BlackBerry 10 operating system out of the box, but the Canadian company decided to go with a full-touch smartphone instead, the Z10. That didn’t go well and BlackBerry was very close to be acquired by another consortium of companies.
Anyway, BlackBerry Q10 is one of the best 10 OS-based smartphones available on the market. The device comes with both a physical QWERTY keyboard and a 3.1-inch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display that supports 720 x 720 pixels resolution.
It also comes equipped with a powerful 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory. For more details on the smartphone, check out our BlackBerry Q10 review.